Mexico got rid of daylight saving time. Should the U.S. end it, too? | Hacker News Reader

Mexico got rid of daylight saving time. Should the U.S. end it, too?

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45 pointsrustoo52 comments

Mexico is much farther south, where the daylight hours are more consistent throughout the year. Virtually no countries around the equator have DST.

DST is only useful in the mid-latitudes, which is right where the USA is, so comparing Mexico to USA isn't very fruitful.

What’s the usefulness of it? Days are short in winter. Can’t stop that from happening. It’s like having a short blanket and pulling it up to cover your head but you uncover your feet.

Winter is standard time, so that's your "normal" time with short days, and most people are awake for all sunlight hours — so moving it around doesn't do much.

Summer, you take an hour of sunlight from the early morning (somewhere between ~3-7am, depending on time of year and your latitude), and "move" it to the evening where nearly everyone can enjoy it.

What your describing with the blanket analogy is exactly what people are proposing with permanent DST in the winter. It will be dark through late morning. The USA tried that once in the 70s for a year, then abandoned it when everyone who initially supported it realized they actually hated it.

California had a ballot referendum for permanent DST back in 2018. It passed with nearly 60% voting in favor. And yet we're still changing clocks twice a year...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_California_Proposition_7

I know little of California politics. How do these propositions work / not work ? 60% voted yes, 7M people. For a yes/no vote like this, what’s even the point of holding such a referendum if its result is not guaranteed to be implemented? Apparently it complied with federal law, but was held back because of… I don’t really understand what, but feels undemocratic for the result to be just ignored.

This one is, IMHO, particularly meaningless.

It allows the California legislature to adopt permanent DST, if the federal law allows it. But the federal law currently allows seasonal DST or permanent standard time, not permanent DST.

Perhaps, it's useful because 1949's proposition 12 adopted DST in California, but it was superceeded by federal law in 1966; and maybe it wasn't clear if the California legislature could legislate against the will of the people as expressed in 1949; in general, the CA legislature can't overturn voter propositions.

There was an interesting "hack" of changing time zones at the time change points instead of trying to adopt permanent DST, instead of a trigger law for if/when federal law allows permanent DST.

And politicians are that short sighted that didn’t see this coming? If it only allows standard time as the only permanent one and we wanted a permanent why didn’t they just offer the one that would work?

> California had a ballot referendum for permanent DST back in 2018.

No, it didn’t.

It had a legislatively-referred statute proposition (neither an initiative, which is a law proposed by the voters, nor a referendum, which is a voter-initiated exercise moving a bill already passed by the legislature to a vote of the people) to both align California law with federal law on Daylight Savings Time (since a prior voter initiative technically locked California into both having a DST switch and having a particular DST period which was no longer the standard federally-allowed period, and the legislature cannot change laws passed by voter initiative without securing the approval of voters) and allow (but not require) the legislature to make further changes to the DST period as long as they were within federal law, including either permanent standard time or permanent DST (but the latter only if federal law was changed to allow it.)

See, https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_7,_Legislativ...

I am sure those words mean something to lawyers. To me, it's still just ignoring an overwhelming voter mandate, but with a lot of extra complicated steps.

The only voter mandate was to align California DST transition in law with federal law (because of the Supremacy Clause, this was already reflected in practice, as federal law superceded state law anyway); the ballot measure allowed the legislature to make further changes as long as federal law allowed, but did not direct any such changes, and it was very clear when we voted on it that we weren’t voting for any specific changes.

So, no, there was no voter mandate that was ignored. The legislature asked for some cleanup and discretionary authority, and the voters said yes. That's it.

Washington state passed permanent DST into law, but there is a federal law on the books saying they need federal congressional approval before they can implement it, so we are just waiting on them. We could actually just get rid of DST without federal approval, but no one really wants that.

Standard or saving time, get rid of the fact you “change” time, it’s stupid and annoying

Permanent DST, at least maybe just in New England.

PNW too, please.

This is a topic I really just don't understand. I've seen dozens and dozens of articles about it in the last couple of years. The only two possibilities I see are either

1) people actually care about this issue, an issue which I've never in my life given one picogram of thought about, it doesn't affect me in the slightest - twice a year we adjust the clocks by an hour, how does this actually bother a significant chunk of people enough to be upset over it?

or 2) the articles are some sort of long-running propaganda campaign pushing the idea for some reason, but I can't for the life of me figure out what they'd gain from it. Is there some sort of political/social power to be gained from getting rid of daylight saving time? Maybe just another "us vs them" divisive issue? I just can't understand it.

It’s a little silly to ask “why do people care so much about this?” I just think changing the time twice a year is worse than…simply not doing that.

But is it worse than shifting our daylight hours for the benefit of (almost) everyone? I don't think so.

If you work with people around the world it’s maddening for them that meetings shift around to times that no longer work for them. It’s actually a huge PITA and there’s no modern reason to do this. This especially impacts people in remote timezones where the 11pm meeting is now 12am, or worse, the 7am meeting is now 6am. People who work at global companies and are seated outside the US are massively inconvenienced by this absurdity.

I’m sure others here will cite the sleep disturbance it causes as well as depression and anxiety due to the sleep disruption. It’s like a tiny jet lag for no practical benefit.

The practical benefit is that, in the summer, you take an hour of sunlight that would normal be around 5-6am where almost no one is awake, and you append it to the evening where nearly everyone will happily appreciate it.

If that's what you appreciate, then feel free to adjust your schedule. Don't drag the rest of us into this. Messing with clocks and changing DST dates is absurd.

If schools, companies, etc want to shift their schedule, then that's on them too.

I'd hardly call a billion people getting to use an extra ~200-240 hours of sunlight a year absurd.

They can wake up earlier and go to bed earlier. Nothing prevents them from utilizing the sunlight due to a nominal time designation. But the time designation changes the structure of all activity unrelated to sunlight for no obvious reason other than “I don’t want to wake up an hour earlier to get that extra hour of sunlight.”

If that’s the case then why don’t we keep the DST permanent? Winter days are short no matter what. Either it’s dark when you leave home or when you wake up.

Being in the PNW I for one would rather the sun go down at 4 in the winter than 3. Losing an hour of sunlight at 10pm in the summer is ok for me. I have blackout shades specifically because the sun is up too late in the summer in the northern US.

I would say that the thing that's most annoying is that the US changed their DST dates to be 5 weeks different.

It didn't really alter anything materially for them, but I do have to be conscious for these couple of weeks twice a year that all my meeting are now offset by an hour.

I make a habit of getting some sort of world clock set up on any machine I use, so I don't have to think about it. Also try to keep anything international in UTC. Which isn't too hard, because my country is UTC+0 during the winter.

if you're trying to choose between the obvious scenario: people get annoyed at losing an hour of sleep randomly once a year. And the highly unlikely: a country-wide conspiracy to use DST as a wedge issue.

You may want to consider whether or not you believe in a flat earth and how that is affecting your other judgments.

There are numerous effects DST might have on people. Having to turn the clock is indeed the smallest of the concerns.

Parents of preschool or school children know the impact. Somehow for some of the kids the "biological clock" is stronger than for an adult. So twice a year you are fighting against that.

No. Get rid of 'Standard' time instead.

DST is an abomination and must go. It doesn't align with natural circadian rhythms.

Hmm I would think the problem is changing the time twice a year? Even if permanent DST was a mismatch to our circadian rhythm, wouldn't that completely depend on how close you are to a date line?

That's the opposite of true. Getting light before the start of the waking hours but getting dark before you're even home—i.e., standard time—is unhealthy. Daylight time aligns to natural circadian rhythms better.

Objectively, more people are awake past 5pm than are awake before 7am.

Humans are the exception. Most animals return home as it gets dark. That is the natural pattern, something we are all primed via evolution. Your personal preference to get more light in the evening because you want to spend more time outdoors runs against evolutionary instincts.

People are ruled by the numbers on the clock, so we should shift the daylight hours during those hours people are awake to match the natural needs of the people.

But from where did the habits tied to the numbers come? Were they formed without reference to daylight?

Will most people always sleep before 7am and be awake after 5pm, no matter when there is daylight?

> and be awake after 5pm, no matter when there is daylight?

For this one at least absolutely yes because of work and after-school activities.

And this exemplifies the political problem that would be better off tossing a coin and being done with it.

Because what would be better depends on your position in the time zone and with where in the day one values daylight hours. There's a set of maps (e.g. [1]) that shows sunrise/sunset times by county and explains the variations quite nicely.

[1] https://conormclaughlin.net/2022/04/visualizing-the-impact-o...

We mustn't let perfection get in the way of progress, comrade.

Any method is superior to screwing up the clocks twice every year.

America tried this in the 1973: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time_in_the_Un...

> Over three months from December to March, public support dropped from 79% to 42%. Some schools moved their start times later.

> Some schools moved their start times later.

Thus demonstrating clearly that adjusting everyone’s clocks is unnecessary?

Yes, but it would only work if it is the actual daylight saving schedule so we're only two hours apart coast to coast. Congress failed to think it through when they tried to do that a couple years ago.

Someone, perhaps Mark Twain, once said that daylight saving time is like cutting off your head and standing on it to make yourself taller.

Why not just compromise and settle on midway: -4.5, -5.5, -6.5, and -7.5 UTC offset? /0.5s

Who hurt you?

A 0.5s timezone is truly abhorrent. Congratulations.

There are places with 15 minute time zones

The same place doesn’t have a rectangular flag too!

Actually, there are places (ok, i know of one, Switzerland) which don't have a rectangular flag but only a square one and have regular DST time/timezone.

I am afraid you are too late to the party.

Because once upon time they could not agree on the choice of either Western or Central time on the border between Western Australia and South Australia, they settled on a real compromise being UTC+08:45 («Australia/Eucla» in the TZ database) which is used in one area in the southeastern corner of Western Australia and one roadhouse in South Australia.

That is how real men settle their differences.

Yes.

Found the counterexample to Betteridge’s Law!

Pretty sure you didn't.

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